The zero point has disappeared – what we know after 30 days

As you probably know by now, the recent updates have changed the world of search engine optimization. On January 22nd, Google, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the URL that earned the featured snippet in a SERP would not receive the additional space in that SERP. This also means that from now on, the featured snippet will be the true spot one position.

30 days are enough to identify trends, but not all answers.

I've been in the industry long enough Search Engine optimization SEO professionals are aware that during a massive restructuring (like the removal of Spot Zero), executives and clients want to know what it means for the company. In situations like this, SEOs' answers are limited to 1) what they can see in their own accounts, and 2) what others are reporting online.

A single period of 30 days is not enough to observe concrete trends and make definitive suggestions about what everyone should do. SEO What should be done. But there's enough time to give a voice to the breakout trends that are worth watching over time. The only way for SEOs to get ahead is to share the trends they're observing. Without each other's data and theories, we'll all only see what's right in front of us—which is often not the bigger picture.

In an effort to advance the discussion about the post-zero world, we on the 97th floor have set about uncovering the trends right under our noses by looking at almost 3.000 before-and-after examples of the snippets presented since January 22nd.

The data and methodology

I know we all just want to see the insights (which you can skip to anyway), but it's worth taking a minute to explain the relaxed methodology that led to the results.

The two main tools used here were Google Search Console and STAT. Although Google Analytics provides more traffic data than GSC, we can only see limited traffic driven by actual keywords because it's limited by sitewide traffic. Therefore, we used GSC to determine the click-through rates of specific keywords on specific pages. This combines well with STAT data, giving us a precise daily overview of the Google Rank and Google Base Rank for the relevant keywords. keywords obtained.

While there are a lot of keywords we need to look at, we found that low-volume keywords—anything under 5.000 global MSV (with a few minor exceptions)—produced results that didn't have enough data to claim statistical significance. Therefore, for all keywords analyzed that had over 5.000 global monthly searches, we conducted the same number of searches as reported by STAT.

Clearly, we were only interested in SERPs that included a snippet to ensure we had an accurate before-and-after comparison, which further narrowed down the number of keywords. In the end, we analyzed 2.773 keywords.

We applied basic formulas to determine which keywords told clear stories. This led us to thoroughly analyze approximately 100 keywords by hand, sometimes spending several hours on a single keyword, or rather, a single SERP, over a 30-day period. The results reported below are derived from these 100 qualitative keyword analyses.

Oh, and this might go without saying, but I do my best to protect 97th Floor's customer data, so I won't reveal anything incriminating about which... Websites My screenshots are attached. 97th Floor has access to hundreds of GSC customer accounts, and we track keywords in STAT for almost every single one of them.

In plain terms: I strive to share the best data and insights, but not at the expense of our customers' privacy.

The results... not what I expected.

Yes, I was among the first SEOs to say that SEOs should actually consider shooting for Spot 2 instead of Spot 1.

I still don't believe I was wrong (as the data below shows), but after this data analysis, I've come to the conclusion that it's a more nuanced story than the quick and dirty results we all want from a study like this.

The best way to unravel the mystery of the zero-point devaluation is to highlight the individual findings of this study as individual lessons. So, in no particular order, here are the results.

Long-time snippet winners see CTR and traffic declines.

While the post-spot zero world may seem exciting to SEOs who have been vying for a high-volume snippet spot for years, websites that have held strong snippet positions indefinitely are seeing fewer clicks.

The keyword below represents a page we created years ago for a client who has held the snippet almost exclusively since its launch. The keyword has a global search volume of 74.000 and a difficulty score of 58, not to mention an average CPC of $38,25. Suffice it to say, this is a highly lucrative keyword and a lucrative position for our client.

We analyzed the click-through rate (CTR) of this single keyword pointing to this single page of the Google Search Console for two weeks before the January 22nd announcement and two weeks after. I would like to go back further than two weeks, but doing so would have included the New Year's figures, which would have skewed the data.

As you can see, the impressions and average position remained almost identical during these two periods. However, the CTR and subsequent clicks dropped dramatically in the two weeks immediately following the spot's abrupt end on January 22nd.

If this trend continues for the remainder of 2020, this single keyword snippet change will result in a decrease of 9.880 clicks in 2020. Again, this is just for a single keyword, not all the keywords this page represents. Factoring in the average CPC, this translates to a loss of $377.910 in clicks (assuming these are paid clicks).

Sure, this is an exaggerated situation due to the volume of the keyword and the inflated CPC, but the principle repeatedly revealed in this research remains the same: brands that have maintained the position of the displayed snippet for long periods of time experience lower CTRs and less traffic as a direct result of spot zero positioning.

If a duplicate snippet is present, the CTR is on the first snippet.

Almost as elusive as the Yeti or Bigfoot, the double-snippet, which is rarely found in its natural habitat, is a rare sight.

This is certainly to be expected; if there are two results that both contain the same snippet, the first one will receive fewer clicks. But the raw numbers left us speechless. In every instance where we encountered this phenomenon, we found that result one (the first featured snippet) lost more than 50% of its click-through rate (CTR) when the second snippet was introduced.

This 40.500 global MSV keyword was the only snippet controller featured on Monday, and on Tuesday the SERP remained untouched (apart from the introduction of the second snippet).

This small change brought our client's CTR to its knees from a respectable 9,2% to a crippling 2,9%.

Looking at how this keyword developed over the course of the week, the trend continues.

Monday and Wednesday are single snippet days, while Tuesday, Thursday and Friday brought the double snippet.

Easy come, easy go (not a real spot 1)

There has been much speculation about this, but now I can confirm that the ranking for a featured snippet is not the same as for a genuine number 1 spot. In the following example, you can see one of our clients hovering around positions 5 and 6 before taking a snippet. Similarly, if they lose the snippet, they fall back to their original position.

Situations like these were all too common. Most of the time, we see URLs that lose the snippet to other URLs. Other times, Google removes the snippet completely, only to bring it back the next day.

If you're wondering what the CTR reporting for the GSC was for the screenshot above, I've included it below. But don't jump to conclusions too quickly; the results aren't very revealing. Which is revealing in itself.

This keyword has 22.200 global volumes and a keyword difficulty level of 44. The SERP has significant traffic, so one would think the results would be more obvious.

If there's one lesson to be learned from situations like this, here it is: Earning the snippet doesn't automatically mean that CTRs will improve beyond what you would get in a position below the fold position.

CTR bump visible below the fold

Much of the data addressed at this point refers to sites that either contain snippets or have lost them, but what about the sites that had no snippets either before or after this restructuring?

If this describes your situation, you can throw a small celebration (emphasis on "small"), because the data suggests that your URLs could receive a slight CTR bump.

The example below shows a 74.000 global MSV keyword with a difficulty that fluctuated between spots 5 and 7 in the week before and after January 22nd.

The screenshot from STAT shows that this keyword has remained well below the fold and is quite consistent. After January 22nd, its ranking actually declined.

The click-through rate improved from 3% to 3,7% in the week following January 22nd. Perhaps not enough to give those below the fold a reason to celebrate, as this small increase was typical for many positions in the middle of the front page.

The "People also ask" boxes are there to steal your snippet CTR.

Perhaps this information is not new, considering that PAA boxes are just another place that can lead users down a rabbit hole of information unrelated to your URL.

In virtually every single SERP (in fact, we didn't find a single case where this wasn't the case), the presence of a PAA box drops the CTR of both the snippet and the standard results.

The negative impact of the PAA box in your SERP is mitigated if the PAA box doesn't appear directly below the displayed snippet. This is rare, but there are situations where the "People also ask" box is lower in the SERP, as in the example below.

If you plan to create more pages here that answer questions appearing in the relevant PAA boxes, take a moment to digest the fact that we rarely saw clicks when our customers appeared in the PAA boxes.

In this case, we have a client who received two of the first four answers in a large SERP (22.000 global monthly search queries), but didn't see a single click – at least not from the GSC:

While its counterpart, which was consistently served in Spot 6, at least achieved some kind of click-through rate:

If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's that ranking below the fold on page 1 is better than getting into the PAA field (at least in terms of clicks).

So, what's available to take away?

As you can see, the results are somewhat scattered. However, the most important takeaway, which I keep coming back to, is this: Clickability is more important than ever.

While sifting through this data, I was constantly reminded of a sentence famously said by our EVP of Operations, Paxton Gray:

"Know your SERPs."

This is even more true today than it was in 2014, when I first heard him.

As I reflected on this pool of frustrating data, I was reminded of Jeff Bezo's remarks in his 2017 letter to Amazon shareholders:

“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely dissatisfied. Their expectations are never static—they rise. That’s human nature. We didn’t rise from our hunter-gatherer days by being content. People have an insatiable appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary.’”
And then it hit me: Google wasn't built for SEOs; it was built for users. Google's job is our job: to deliver the best content to users. Our credo at 97th Floor is: We make the internet a better place. It sounds a bit cheesy, but we stand by it. Every page we create, every ad we run, every interactive page we build, and every PDF we publish for our clients must make the internet a better place. And while it's challenging for us to watch Google's updates capture our clients' clicks, we understand it's for the user. This is just another step in the elegant dance we perform with Google.

SEO today is more than just stuffing your keyword into a title and pushing a few links onto a page. SERP features can have a more direct impact on your clicks than your own page optimizations. But that doesn't mean SEO is out of our control—far from it. SEOs will succeed, we always do, but we need to share our experiences with each other. After all, transparency makes the internet a better place.